THE "QUANTUM LEAP" PRIMER
Created by: Sally Smith (sallylb@netcom.com)
Updated by: Deb Brown (dmb@world.std.com)
Further updated by: Sally Smith
Copyright 1992 by Sally Smith and Deb Brown.
You may freely copy and distribute this guide for personal use
provided that it is distributed in its entirety, with all original
author and copyright information intact. Any sales of this document
are expressly forbidden, without the specific consent of the authors.
Revision date: 10/29/92
Note that this contains internal contradictions as well as not agreeing
with earlier versions, but hey...take it up with Bellisario, not me!
PROJECT QUANTUM LEAP: This top secret project is located in a cavern
in New Mexico in 1995 (at the time of the pilot episode; it's now
sometime in 1999). By ~ fall 1996, it's cost $43 billion of our tax
dollars, with $2.4 billion a year operating funds. However, it started
out with just Sam and Al "raising the funding, poring over the
blueprints late at night", and listening to the score of "Man of La
Mancha". :-)
SAM (Dr. Samuel Beckett, no relation to the playwright. Social
Security number 563-86-9801, Department of Defense Umbra top-secret
clearance 004-002-02-016): Born August 8, 1953 and grew up on his
family's dairy farm in Elk Ridge, Indiana. As a child, he had two
cats, named Donner and Blitzen, but never had a dog. He could read at
age 2, do advanced calculus in his head at 5, went to MIT at age 15
(or maybe 17), graduating 2 years later, and has 6 (maybe 7)
doctorates including music, medicine, quantum physics, and ancient
languages, but NOT psychiatry or law.
He speaks 7 modern languages including English, Japanese, French,
Spanish and German, but not Italian or Hebrew and 4 dead ones (he can
read Egyptian hieroglyphics). He has a Nobel Prize, field
unspecified, but probably for physics. For this, "Time" magazine
called him "the next Einstein".
He played the piano at Carnegie Hall at 19, plays guitar, is a good
dancer, and sings tenor (his favorite song is John Lennon's
"Imagine"). He has a photographic memory, can cook, and likes dry or
light beer and microwave popcorn. Sam also knows several kinds of
martial arts and has been afraid of heights since he was 9 years old.
He was originally engaged once, but was stood up at the altar. An
accident occurred during a leap in the middle of a lightning storm
which caused Sam and Al to temporarily change places. At this time,
he discovered he was NOT stood up at the altar and that he was in fact
married to his greatest love, Dr. Donna Alessi. This was no doubt due
to events in a prior leap where he was able to alter her life in such
a way that she was able to commit to marriage with him.
Sam's older brother Tom, a good athlete, All-State basketball player,
Annapolis grad and Navy SEAL (who convinced Sam to go to MIT) died in
Vietnam, on April 8, 1970. However, Sam managed to save him on one
leap. Sam's dad, John Samuel Beckett, died in 1974 (or maybe 1972, or
maybe 1973) of a heart attack. He has one sister named Katie
(Katherine), born during a flood in 1957, whose first husband was an
abusive alcoholic named Chuck (Unless maybe Sam convinced her not to
marry him. Who knows?). Now she's married to a Navy officer, Lt. Jim
Bonnick, and lives in Hawaii with their mom, Thelma Louise Beckett.
AL (Rear Admiral Albert Calavicci, born June 15, 1934): When Al was a
child, his part Russian mom ran off with an encyclopedia salesman.
Al's dad was from Abruzzi, Italy, so he speaks fluent Italian. His
father was a construction worker, so when dad went to the Middle East,
Al was sent to an orphanage, and his retarded sister Trudy to an
institution. Later, his dad and his dad's girlfriend used to sneak
him out of the orphanage. Kept running away, once to join the circus
and once he spent several months traveling with a pool wizard. He had
a pet cockroach named Kevin (in the orphanage) and a dog named Chester
(who he lost custody of to his third wife). While in the orphanage,
Al took up acting and also fought Golden Gloves. When he was old
enough, he went to get his sister but she'd died of pneumonia in the
institution (in 1953, aged 16).
Later, Al went to Annapolis, joined the Navy, and became a pilot. From
1968-1973 (or maybe 1975), he was a prisoner of the Viet Cong; during
this time, his first wife Beth, a Navy nurse, lost hope, had him
declared dead and married a lawyer. Somewhere along the line, he also
attended MIT and went on civil rights marches in the '60's. Later, he
became an astronaut and is now a rear admiral ("highly respected and
decorated"). He likes sports cars and classic cars and collects them.
Al likes to watch sports, gambles a little (trips to Las Vegas,
betting on horse races), and in the past, he had a tendency to drink
to excess. Al met Sam on the Starbright Project (we don't know what
that was); when they first met, Al was drunk beating up on a vending
machine with a hammer. It was Sam's influence that prevented Al from
being removed from the project because of his drinking. It was
possibly his association with Sam that helped sober him up.
This is, however, all secondary to Al's main interest, which is women!
He's been married 5 times, spending his 1st, 3rd, and 5th honeymoons
on the train to Niagara Falls. Wife #2 (no name given yet) was
Hungarian, wife #3 Ruthie was Jewish, #4 was Sharon ("she wore pink
babydolls"), #5, named Maxine ("she didn't wear anything at all--she
used to flavor her toes with mint leaves") he met in a tattoo parlor.
Al's currently semi-regularly dating a blonde woman named Tina (they
met in Vegas), who is a Pulse Communication Technician on Project
Quantum Leap, has a pet crocodile and a tattoo in a "super-private
part of her anatomy". Although Al firmly believes in the "double
standard", he really does respect women as individuals and gets very
angry when they're mistreated. Al dresses flashy, smokes a lot of
cigars, is somewhat superstitious, has a serious aversion to dead
bodies, and knows a great recipe for chitlins.
MORE ON THE PROJECT: We don't know what it was supposed to do, other
than allow Sam to time-travel within his own lifetime; we do know that
Sam leaped too soon (before everything was ready; they were
threatening to cut funding), and apparently God [or Fate or Time or
some other unfathomable force--like maybe Don Bellisario? :-) it's
never been directly said] decided to use Sam to "put things right that
once went wrong". The Project is built around Sam and Al's brain
waves. When he leaps, Sam actually physically replaces the leapee in
the past, (they're in the future, to keep things even), the leapee's
aura (and Sam's in the "future") is what the people around him see; he
only knows who he's leaped into when he looks in the mirror, and is
forever having to figure out who he's replaced and what good deed he's
there to do. Sam's the only guy who can figure out how to get himself
back home, but the first leap completely Swiss-cheesed his memory
(Al's term is 'magnafluxed'). Under normal conditions, Sam's the only
person who can see and hear Al, although animals, people on the verge
of death, the "mentally absent" and children under 5 always can (they
also see Sam as himself). Al appears to Sam through a "neurological
hologram" process: "agitated carbon quarks tuned to the optic and otic
neurons". Al sees Sam as the leapee, but always knows who he is.
GOOSHIE (played by Dennis Wolfberg) is Ziggy's programmer/operator and
operates the imaging chamber that projects Al's image back to Sam.
He's the one Al sometimes talks to. He's a "short guy with bad breath"
and a mustache, and Tina once went to Vegas for a weekend with him
just to make Al jealous. It worked. Ziggy says he's having an affair
with Tina [So does Dennis Wolfberg ;-)]. Gooshie has appeared in
several episodes, and once took over Al's hologram duty thanks to an
emergency jury-rigging by Ziggy.
ZIGGY: The project's "parallel hybrid computer", created by Sam.
Ziggy has a definite personality; he has a big ego, crashes a lot,
hates to be wrong, and frequently sulks! He freaks out sometimes,
too--once he turned off the climate control, once he wouldn't output
in anything but Japanese, and once he stuck an extra zero on the end
of everyone's paycheck, leaving Al to report "half the staff took off
on vacation!"
Well, that's what we thought until Sept. 1991. Then--
We saw Ziggy in the fourth season opener, in which he was discovered
to be a she. The possibility exists that the influence of Sam's wife
Dr. Donna Alessi may have given Ziggy a female identity. A perfect
example of Sam's changes catching up with them. Ziggy responds to
queries with a female voice (co-executive producer Deborah Pratt's)
and therefore may be the narrator of the saga cell that opens the show
each week. She still has a big ego, though.
SUBJECT TO CHANGE W/O NOTICE AS THE WRITERS GET MORE BRIGHT IDEAS
Oh BOY is this subject to change.... ;-)
Keep Leaping...